- School administrators know: when you send your child off to school, you want to make sure they are safe and school districts in our neighborhoods are working to do, this despite some changes they have in this year's funding.
- Per-pupil mental health and school safety funding for our local school districts was reduced by hundreds of millions of dollars, leaving schools to make fast changes to their budgets.
Everyone agrees that when you send your child off to school safety is key but the challenge now for school administrators is finding the money to do so.
"We know that we won't be able to keep them forever and these are positions that we need," Dr. Kinzer said.
When taking up the role as superintendent of Mason Public Schools, Dr. Gary Kinzer's goal is to put students first.
"We want to provide direct support services to all students."
Money from the state helps with that. Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the 2025 fiscal year budget saying its passage puts students first and backs our schools with the essential funds and resources. But with the passing of the budget, districts anticipated hundreds of thousands but got less, leaving them frantic.
"We were slated to receive over 700,000 dollars and that's been reduced to over 90 percent. Almost half of that money was to be spent on school safety priorities and the rest on mental health."
In the past two years, Mason Public Schools used the grant funding for a district-wide safety assessment and hired 5 mental health-related positions. This year, they continued the positions with some allocations from the general fund, something parents applaud for continuing.
"It's something that needs to be here. A lot of these opportunities are not available for other districts."
But unless additional funding comes from the state level, these programs could be no more.
"We still have priorities that we need to attend to and we will need 31aa restored at least partially to continue that really important work."
Other neighborhood school districts share the impacts the state budget has on their school budgets:
MASON PUBLIC SCHOOL DISTRICT
“31aa is known as a mental health but a significant portion of the money from the grant also is utilized to fund school safety which is of critical importance to every school district. In the summer of 2022, we used grant money to do a school safety assessment and arrived at priorities for our school district. We have used 31aa dollars to pay for significant security updates in all of our buildings. We still have priorities that we need to attend to and we will need 31aa restored at least partially to continue that really important work.”
EAST LANSING PUBLIC SCHOOLS DISTRICT
“Using the information, we had at the time. We anticipated. We knew there would be a possibility of a decrease but we did not predict a 72% decrease in those funds allocated specifically for mental health and school safety.”
“We’ve used those funds over the last couple of years to increase social work in the district, increase…we’ve added deans of students to support students that may have some at-risk factors that needed some more support, we’ve also added a director of health and safety, we added a mental health coordinate and really focused on the elementary work of behavior system specialist as well. So the impact for us, we’re fortunate that we have a healthy fund balance that were at this point of the summer when we found out about the final budget, we did not eliminate any positions. We were going to be able to cover them out of our general fund while pulling some from our fund balance to do that for this year but we cannot operate long-term on a deficit budget. We have to get our budget balanced.”
PRESIDENT OF STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION
"We’ve made great progress in providing mental health services to children in their schools. But there’s a lot of work still to be done. This is not the time to take our foot off the gas pedal. We need to continue staffing up with helping professionals so that we make sure that our children are receiving the mental health services that they need and that our schools are safe.”
The Michigan Education Association tells FOX47 they are continuing conversations with state legislators about a supplemental education budget for this school academic year.
Want to see more local news? Visit the FOX47News Website.
For more news about the State Capitol, go to the State Capitol neighborhood page on our website.
Stay in touch with us anytime, anywhere.
Sign up for newsletters emailed to your inbox.
Select from these options: Neighborhood News, Breaking News, Severe Weather, School Closings, Daily Headlines, and Daily Forecasts.
